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Kathy Ledesma doesn't own an iPod. Or an Xbox. Or a stretchy pair of sweats with juicy on the rear. She doesn't drink Bud Light. Or wear Nikes. Or paint her nails with Hard Candy's Peep Show pink. She bought her dining room table during the first Bush administration, and has used the same mayonnaise since 1971. She's a little confused about whether Nelly and Nelly Furtado are the same person.

From Madison Avenue's standpoint, the 52-year-old Encinitas, California, art-glass entrepreneur is a has-been. Washed up as a consumer. A marketer's black hole. Send a message out to her, common wisdom says, and you're throwing money at a lost cause--a person with calcified brand preferences; an already overstocked larder, wardrobe, and garage; and little interest in the kind of spending that makes marketers merry.

But a small avant-garde of trend-tracking marketers is now challenging that axiom. Dismiss Ledesma and her peers at your peril, they say. If you do, you're likely to miss the biggest, richest, most lucrative market of the future: boomer women.

Given marketers' obsession with youth--a fixation that began, not surprisingly, in the 1960s when the boomers themselves were adolescents--this may seem an odd cohort to target. But the numbers don't lie.

The 40-plus age group is now 45% bigger than the 18-to-39 group and will be 60% bigger by 2010. In 1989, adults 40 and older became the biggest adult segment for the first time in U.S. history, making them the new customer majority. The leading edge of the boomer cohort--which encompasses people born between 1946 and 1964--is 58 now, and if past experience is any indicator, the group that humorist Joe Queenan called "the most self-important generation in history" is likely to transform middle age and beyond, much as it did puberty, early adulthood, and thirtysomething.

More important, boomers have bucks. Lots of bucks. According to Mature Marketing & Research, a Boston-based firm, they control more than half of the nation's discretionary income and three-quarters of the country's financial wealth. And they're likely to get their hands on even more. Boomers' parents, the Silent Generation, are dying off, and inheritances will spell the largest intergenerational wealth transfer in history. Add it all up, and by 2010, spending by people 40 and older will be "a trillion dollars greater than spending by people between the ages of 18 and 34--$2.6 trillion versus $1.6 trillion," says David Wolfe, author of Ageless Marketing (Dearborn Trade Publishing, 2003).

And the folks wielding the turbocharged wallets are most often women. Consider Ledesma, who over the past year spent $10,000 on kilns, torches, and tools for her art-glass business, Bluesdawg Creations. She and her husband, Pablo, also bought a new refrigerator, a Ford SUV, and a dorm room's worth of furnishings for her college-age daughter, Jessica. They took trips to Las Vegas, Virginia, and Tucson, and sprang for tickets to Simon and Garfunkel and Lyle Lovett. "I make almost all the purchasing decisions in our house," Ledesma says. "I do the research, we discuss what I've found, and then Pablo says, 'Yeah, honey, whatever.' "